Here’s a thought experiment, and a feminist one. A lot of the conversation about the next generation of Democrats centers on the technocrat: the Pete
Month: October 2026
Out in Middleville, Michigan, about twelve hundred men and women who build water heaters for Bradford White walked off the job on September 16. Nobody
A 1937 Packard 120, and what it takes to make one now In a glass-walled room on Route 30, a black sedan sits on jack
Johnstown packs its houses tight, shoulder to shoulder along the streets, and a wide shot of this block would give you a dozen other things
Scarf weather update: the orange-and-brown plaid my aunt gave me, the one that makes me look like a pumpkin spice candle. There’s fog on the
A Bright Meadow Group ODI Concept Paper In a recent column, Nathaniel Leery argued that the way to a smaller government runs through more elected
Ranked choice voting and the many-sided republic Madison designed There’s a gas station on a county road I drive on Saturdays, and its cooler tells
Two Names I want to set two names next to each other, the way you might set two stones on a fence post after a
Artificial Intelligence Bright Meadow Group Design Environmental Science and Research Thought Experiments
The Notes Tesla Left
A thermomagnetic heat sink for cooling data without water OBSERVE The Thirst Behind the Screen A data center is a building full of machines that
The Lantern You Ride In Sellersburg, Indiana, 2024. Dusk settles over a mown field, and the balloons come up off the grass one at a
Wednesday. Coffee’s black, the paper’s spread across the desk, and the first thing I learn is the harvest was good. Strong yields across Cambria County
A long blue-gray bow over the Ohio, and the story of the steel inside it Coming down the Ohio from Pittsburgh, past the shipyard ghosts
The Four Kinds of Bluesky Users (and Which One I Turned Out to Be) Scarf report: the mustard one. It doesn’t match anything I own,
Read the Paperwork Sit down a minute. Coffee’s still hot. Folks keep asking me who I’m voting for on November 3rd. I tell them what
A Programmable Light-Based Computing Architecture and Its Baseline Experiment Observe. Design. Intervene. Abstract This paper proposes a classical optical computing architecture built as a twelve-by-twelve
Artificial Intelligence Culture Finance and Banking Government Midway Meme Machine Reviews Science and Research Thought Experiments Web Services
Please Hold: Your War Is Important to Us
Comcast has worn the crown for poor customer service among internet providers for years, the way a small town keeps the one stoplight that blinks
The Brusentsov Drive and the Return of Ternary Computing An extension of Multi-Dimensional Signal Computing (February 12, 2026) Abstract Modern computers run on two answers:
In June I added a third box to the hive down by the river. Bees build until they run out of room, and a colony
Bright Meadow Group Design Finance and Banking Science and Research Single Payer Health Thought Experiments
The American Health System
A Bright Meadow Group analysis of Medicare for All from the employer’s side of the ledger A company that paid a supplier nearly $27,000 a
St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church, Johnstown Drive down Maple Avenue and the skyline does something you don’t expect from a Pennsylvania mill town.
I Flew Halfway Across the District to Hear My Congressman Talk I lifted off a power line in Cambria County with a simple errand. Find
Stand at the bottom of these steps and look up, and your eye goes to the two rounded porches before it reaches the columns. Each
Miss Ordinary tries to write something cozy and ends up doing homework instead. Scarf weather update: the gray wool one with the frayed corner, wrapped
A Bright Meadow Group sketch of a federal high-speed rail network, built outward from the Texas junction Lone Star Junction put a pin in Texas
Somebody parked a sixty-nine-year-old Chevrolet against an ivy-choked brick wall in a small Pennsylvania coal town, and the turquoise on it is brighter than anything
Four miles east of Johnstown, near Mineral Point, the Little Conemaugh River swings in a long loop around a ridge. In the late 1820s, the
When I boxed Golden Gloves, the smallest man in the ring was the referee. He didn’t throw punches and he didn’t pick the winner. He
Bright Meadow Group Design Energy Government High Speed Rail Science and Research Thought Experiments
The Lone Star Junction
A Bright Meadow Group look at the Texas T-Bone and the case for a hemispheric rail hub Put a pin in a map of the
When engineers and critics size up a major bridge, the Golden Gate or Switzerland’s Salginatobel, they tend to ask three questions. The Princeton engineer David
The coffee had gone cold on the porch rail before I noticed it, which is how I knew the news had hold of me. The
Artificial Intelligence Bright Meadow Group Design Energy Environmental Science and Research Thought Experiments Uncategorized
Design for Reasoning: Infrastructure Edition
One corpus, read as a single design: how machines should think, where they should live, and who should own them Over the past ten months
Man Made: Nothing New Under the SunA coin, a lever, and two thousand years of selling things to strangers It stands about chest-high to a
“He’s not man enough to be governor.” That’s Gina Hinojosa, standing outside Greg Abbott’s mansion in Austin Thursday morning, publicly calling him out for being
A lot of young men meet Fight Club secondhand, as a training manual. Clips of Tyler Durden laying out the rules get cut over gym
A rocket burns the bulk of its fuel in the first few minutes. On the pad it’s a tower of propellant with a small payload
The Jet That Rivals Built A video made the rounds recently. An F-35B drifts in over a bay, slows to a hover, holds there like
A friend talked me into a night out on Polish Hill last weekend. The place she picked is a punk bar, which is a little
Man Made: St. Mary’s Byzantine Catholic Church, Cambria City Come down Power Street in Cambria City and the domes show up before the building does.
Fred Gipson published Old Yeller in 1956, and Disney put it on the screen the next year. Generations of kids have cried through it as
Prophetstown State Park, Tippecanoe County, Indiana A few miles from Battle Ground, where a monument and a museum stand over the ground where William Henry
Gooski’s, Polish Hill, PittsburghRibbon Awarded: Solid Second I’d heard plenty about Gooski’s before I walked in, and like any place people bother talking about, I
What the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry says about where to dig next I learn things I have no use for. I read chemistry I’ll
A young fellow caught me by the coffee pot and asked why he ought to pay union dues when he already makes decent money. “Mr.
The Fanless Fan Room: A Bright Meadow Group concept paper Observe: Cabinets Built for the Wrong Occupant A server cabinet is laid out for the
Man Made | Ambridge–Aliquippa Bridge, Beaver County, Pennsylvania Follow Route 51 along the west bank of the Ohio at Aliquippa and the trees part long
Dale at the feed store rang up two sacks of sugar this morning and asked whether the bees were done for the year. Close to
The tower sits on an octagon of red brick, a riveted steel drum shedding white paint in long rust tears. At its foot, a big
GETTYSBURG — The good news came first. Gettysburg CARES, which runs the only cold-weather shelter in Adams County, has bought itself a permanent home at
Cambria City is a ten-by-four-block grid of row houses on the far bank of the Conemaugh, across the river from where the Cambria Iron Company’s
Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Design Environmental Permaculture Science and Research Thought Experiments
Room to Climb
Our Happy Orang piece made the case for a better press: get more oil out of the palms already growing, and fewer forests have to
There’s a conversation going around right now about Gen X and how many of them went MAGA. It’s been scrolling past on my phone between
Some cars get photographed because they’re beautiful. The Model T gets photographed because it put the rest of them on the road. This one is
I am a conservationist by nature, and orangutans have had a hold on me for a long time. Some of it is the name. Orang
Come around the bend on the ramp below East Pittsburgh at sunrise and the George Westinghouse Bridge fills the windshield like a stage set. Five
The first shop I worked in after the Army had an old millwright the whole floor called Deacon. He was seventy if he was a
You probably didn’t land here on purpose. Few people do. Somebody shared a link, or a search took a wrong turn, or you were following
Turning a Warehouse Into Its Own Power Plant A million-square-foot distribution warehouse in western Pennsylvania pays for electricity in three ways. It pays for the
A customer action for Duquesne Light households in Allegheny and Beaver counties UPDATE: Strike Over Contract Ratified On October 1, nearly 1,000 IBEW Local 29
Back in March 2025, this site ran a panorama of Pittsburgh from the Grandview Avenue overlook, the postcard angle, with the camera warping the sidewalk
Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Culture Finance and Banking Government republican Virtue Science and Research Thought Experiments
The Open Ladder
My well pump quit in August, on the hottest Tuesday of the summer, which is the only day a well pump knows how to quit.
When I was small, my dad was a mechanic. Around the time I hit third or fourth grade, he started driving trucks, first for a
I came here to write about scarves. That was the plan. It’s the first real sweater morning in Johnstown. The fog is still sitting on
The grid has to grow and get more efficient in the same decade. The ground can only hand over so much copper, lithium and cobalt
The Fin Outlived the Future In a strip-mall lot in Pennsylvania, outside an auto parts store with a “We Loan Specialty Tools” banner in the
Artificial Intelligence Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Design Digital Technology Man Made Science and Research Thought Experiments
One Button First
Observe A mind-controlled video game already exists. In 2021 Neuralink released footage of a macaque named Pager playing Pong through a brain implant, and a